February 14, 2011 at 10:32 am
Affirmative Action performs acts of “corrective justice.” Public policy is used to compensate members of a deprived group for prior losses and for gains unfairly achieved by others that resulted from prior governmental action. Corrective justice, the legal philosopher Jules Coleman has noted, is different from a fair allocation of goods. Rather, it identifies interventions […]
February 11, 2011 at 2:24 pm
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. — Henry David Thoreau, from “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” in Walden, which book students will be reading this spring in CC202: From the Enlightenment to Modernity.
February 10, 2011 at 2:21 pm
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. — Henry David Thoreau, from the Conclusion to Walden, which book students will be reading this […]
February 9, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Day was departing, and the darkening air Called all earth’s creatures to their evening quiet While I alone was preparing as though for war To struggle with my journey and with the spirit Of pity, which flawless memory will redraw: O Muses, O genius of art, O memory whose merit Has inscribed inwardly those things […]
February 8, 2011 at 12:20 pm
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. — Henry David Thoreau, in “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” from Walden, which book students will be reading this spring in CC202: From the Enlightenment to Modernity.
February 7, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Night followed day in swift succession. On earth at that time a day lasted for only five or six hours. The planet spun madly on its axis. The moon hung heavy and threatening in the sky, far closer, and so looking much bigger, than today. Stars rarely shone, for the atmosphere was full of smog […]
February 4, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Mitochondria are a silly place to store genes. They are often glibly called the powerhouses of the cell, but the parallel is quite exact. Mitochondrial membranes generate an electric charge, operating across a few millionths of a millimetre, with the same voltage as a bolt of lightning, a thousand times more powerful than domestic writing. […]
February 3, 2011 at 11:52 am
The word ‘fact’ is always likely to make biologists tremble in their boots, as there are so many exceptions to every rule; but one such ‘fact’ is virtually certain about oxygenic photosynthesis – it only evolved once. — Nick Lane, in his discussion of the evolution of photosynthesis, page 73, in Life Ascending: The Ten […]
February 2, 2011 at 12:01 pm
The chimeric ancestor of the eukaryotes apparently succumbed to an invasion of jumping genes from its mitochondria. — Nick Lane, in his discussion of the evolution of cellular complexity, page 115, in Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, a book now studied in CC106: Biodiversity
February 2, 2011 at 10:35 am
In this view, any science begins in the nothingness of ignorance, constructing theories as facts accumulate. In such a world, debunking would be primarily negative, for it would only shuck some rotten apples from the barrel of accumulated knowledge. But the barrel of theory is always full; sciences work with elaborated contexts for explaining facts […]
